“The most exciting thing I aspire to do is to write something new that I know is going to work, or perform something that I know is going to make people laugh.”

I do not have very much office experience.

Battered Women: sounds delicious. Doesn’t make it right.

It’s not always enough to be brave, I realized years later. You have to be brave and contribute something positive, too. Brave on its own is just a party trick.

Travel is impossible, but daydreaming about travel is easy.

Nobody remembers how long anything takes; they only remember how good it was in the end.

If people are well paid for reality television and cotton candy and dunking a basketball, why can’t they be well paid for changing young minds?

Regret is just perfectionism plus time.

I think it’s better to not know certain things. It gives the world an extra bit of mystery, which is important to us as human beings.

Different people have different styles, but there is an opportunity as a director to be a writer in every moment, with every visual cue and every piece of production design. Everything is a decision, and everything can be obsessed over.

I wanted to be a writer first, and I struck out in the world to be a writer first, and then found stand-up as a more creative outlet, as a 3D way to be creative.

Mindy Kaling gets her own line in the acknowledgments, as previously negotiated by her representatives. Thanks, Mindy. I love you and you’re the best.

Perfect. Why was this so hard to find?”The other type of perfect is the type you never could have expected and then could never replicate.

If you love something, let it go. If you don’t love something, definitely let it go. Basically, just drop everything, who cares.

There’s not many good comedies to watch – you know, comedies that make you glad you watched them.

Good comics gravitate to each other; you know who’s your type of person by watching them onstage, hopefully.

I’m a believer in trusting the director.

They want to let the audience figure things out and let the reaction shot get the laugh.

Analysing comedy is like dissecting a frog. Nobody laughs and the frog dies.

Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Weep, an’ it keeps on laughin’.

If you’re asking me what I love, it’s that point where I’m just scribbling and trying to make myself laugh and trying to outrage myself. Getting in that frame of mind where the more you laugh the more you laugh – I think that’s what I’m attempting to do.

When you laugh with good-hearted innocence at your own creations, you are free.

I’ll get laughs in the places I don’t want them and that makes me realize the direction I want to go in. I don’t mean to get too deep into comedy here.

This is getting funny, but there ain’t nobody laughing.

For my first show at ‘SNL’, I wrote a Bill Clinton sketch, and during our read-through, it wasn’t getting any laughs.